Category Archives: religion

Life Divine… or not

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Unfortunately, it is not something we can get to by just dreaming about it.

I bought a book again. Despite my earlier criticism of the Kindle, I did buy the Kindle edition. At least it was 55% off, but truly they ought to be 75% off. After all, you can get half the price of a used book back from a used-book store, if it is treated reasonably well. And before that, you can lend it to your friends, if they treat it reasonably well. (And they should, if they want to be your friends!)

Anyway, it was a heavy tome, so if we add the cost of shipping it to Norway, I came pretty close to saving my 75%. Keep moving in this direction, Amazon!

The book this time was The Life Divine, by none less than Sri Aurobindo himself. He is like the Teilhard de Chardin of Hinduism, except with a name I can spell. OK, Teilhard probably did not have a history as a freedom fighter before turning to metaphysics, but they are both famous for integrating evolution into religion. Or perhaps the other way around.

(On a lighter note, I seem to have named my first spacefaring race in Spore “Bindo” in honor of him, last year (?) when I played that. Spore is a game of guided evolution, based on the assumption that nature has an innate drive toward sentience and that a cosmos filled with intelligent and creative life is unavoidable. I am sure Sri Aurobindo would have agreed, though he would surely not have had time to play it himself. Neither have I, these days, although my reasons are less admirable.)

The book is said to be 1100 pages, although it is obviously many more on my mobile phone. The prose is heavy, even to me. (I am not sure if it is heavier than mine, or just heavy in a different way.) Then again he was not a native English speaker, but came from India. Perhaps we foreigners tend to go wild in the language’s immense vocabulary? Luckily I have been assured that the book contains many repetitions, though I have not come to them yet. Repetitions as in saying the same things over in a slightly different way. Apart from that, I suppose we don’t have that much in common, Sri Aurobindo and I.

The thought has struck me that this is a book that would have been nice to have in my bookshelf. Â If nothing else, there is a good chance that my heirs would find it on my bookshelf after my passing (may it yet be far off) and think to themselves: “A thick book about The Life Divine? Surely Uncle Magnus must have passed on to a better place, then, having had such interests in his later years!” And they would feel comforted.

Unfortunately, their comfort would be somewhat exaggerated. Even reading The Life Divine is none too easy, but living one is still much further off. And it is still too early to say for sure whether this book will help me toward that goal. But even should it do so, that alone will not be enough.

I am obviously not talking about good vs evil here. And certainly not spirit vs matter. I am happy to see already in the second chapter of the book, Aurobindo establishes that matter and spirit are different in degree rather than being opposites. This is also the Biblical doctrine: All creation comes from the same One, who also in the end will be All in All. Â For this reason, we pray: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” rather than “Please let us escape this goddamn material world and flee to your spiritual Heaven”.

I was about to apply the usual disclaimers, but I don’t think even I should add disclaimers to the Lord’s Prayer…

It is when it comes to the details that it becomes hard to pray “Thy will be done”. But then again that has never been easy. It was, by all accounts, not easy for Jesus either. But then Jesus presumably did not have a Jesus, while we have.

In any case, the idea for which Aurobindo is famous is not so much theological as just logical. Seeing how matter gave rise to life, and life to mind, we must assume that mind will give rise to supermind, a higher consciousness. Since there have already been some people with a higher consciousness, they can be seen as harbingers or forerunners for the rest of us.

(I wrote vaguely about this in my “Next Big Thing” series of essays, probably my most important writing in this blog. Or it would have been important if others had not said it better before me, but at the time I did not know of that. And this is its value. It is the notes of an explorer, not of a parrot.)

(Ironically, the more I learn about esoteric matters, the harder it becomes to come up with an original thought that I have not already seen elsewhere. But then again, re-inventing the wheel is overrated, especially if you can get a rounder wheel from someone else for free!)

***

My own life is certainly not divine these days. I wake up morning after morning filled with lust, so that it is difficult to not look twice at the women I see on the bus or in the city, and I had to suspend my fiction project as I kept imagining embarrassing things about the main character.

I am not convinced that this is coincidence. It seems to me that in the world of the mind, much like in physics, any action leads to an opposite reaction. So by taking an interest in the higher mind, perhaps I indirectly vitalize the lower mind. The totality of the psyche has a great inertia, I believe.

Then again, your psyche may vary.

What is a High Spirit?

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Thomas Edison was hardly a saint, but his tireless efforts have helped millions of people even after his death, so he is portrayed as a High Spirit in “The Laws of Eternity”, a book and movie by Happy Science.

In the new Japanese religion Kofuku-no-Kagaku (Science of Happiness, also translated Happy Science) there is an interesting concept called “High Spirits”. Not in the English sense of someone being in high spirits, though I suppose there may be a connection by accident of language.

Let me explain in my own words, since I have never seen it defined.

In this life, a High Spirit is someone who wants to help many, and is also able to do it.

A High Spirit continues to inspire people even after leaving this world.

In the distant past, people may have worshiped such High Spirits as gods. Later they were venerated as saints (in Christianity) or Bodhisattvas (in Buddhism). The many avatars in Hinduism may also have been the same type of person. Outside religion, they may appear as scientists and philosophers.

Obviously not just any philosophy has the ability to help many people. Some may even do the opposite, as do many branches of religion. Even an honest wish to save or help people is not enough, you also need to be qualified to do it. This is not something you can just shrug into like a coat. It must be your being – who you really are.

I think this is an interesting concept because it is non-sectarian. Normally a Christian would only acknowledge Christian saints and try to downplay all other people who have done good in the world, but is this really something Jesus, known as The Truth, would agree with? There are obviously things that you cannot do across religions, but there are also things you can do. Even a Muslim benefits from Newton’s discoveries, even though Newton was certainly not a Muslim to the best of his knowledge. And so on.

In any case, even though I am not a member of Kofuku-no-Kagaku, I have adopted this concept as a useful tool in my toolbox of thought. I can’t say that I am such a High Spirit myself. But (here in Norway at least) we have a true saying: “You will become like those you are together with.” So I suppose it might still happen if I live my 120 years… Well, perhaps a “Slightly Elevated Spirit”?

“The Soul After Death”

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The unbearably bright Light of Heaven. This picture is, ironically, from the Happy Science anime The Laws of Eternity. A similar episode is recounted in the book I review, but the feelings the book inspire in me are completely different.

I recently bought the book The Soul After Death by Fr. Seraphim Rose, an Eastern Orthodox cleric. The book is written as a reaction to the spate of Near Death Experiences which reached media a few decades ago. These experiences were generally positive:  People were first confused to see their body from above, but soon found out that they could move about, and then a great Light appeared, filled with love and forgiveness and even sometimes humor, encouraging them to reflect on their life and what was really important to them. Deceased relatives and friends might make a brief appearance, and sometimes short journeys to a (usually pleasant) Elsewhere, before they had to (or chose to) return to their body.

Rose is not impressed. He compares this to the extensive Orthodox lore of after-death, and concludes that the NDEs are at best ignorance, but most likely demonic influence. The ethereal world around us is not positive or neutral, but utterly fallen and teeming with demons, who will masquerade as anything or anyone to convince people to turn their back on Orthodoxy, which alone can save them, and then only if you dedicate yourself to it without reservation for the rest of your life.

I think Fr. Rose has many good points, including some of his main points. People (that would be me) are too superficial and too easily convinced that eternal life is easy to get and Hell is almost unattainable except perhaps by Hitler and the like. The Bible certainly can be read as saying the opposite. And most of the messages from the supposed afterlife are inane and banal. True. I am not a big fan of New Age spirituality myself.  That is not the problem.

The problem is the overwhelming onslaught of darkness that radiates from the pages of the book.  About halfway through, when I frankly gave up, even I was starting to wonder if I have been misled by demons from my youth, if the loving Presence that has encouraged me to look hard at the evil in myself and distance myself from it, to understand and implicitly forgive others, that this Presence that has been essential to my life for decades now must surely be a demon. After all, God’s angels (much less God himself) would not have anything to do with people who are not Orthodox and following the proper Orthodox path of asceticism.

No, I don’t think so.  The effect of this book, whatever its intent, was one of despair, bitterness, doubt and darkness.  I shudder to think of this book falling into the hand of someone suffering from depression.  It projected a vision of a world where God has been defeated by Satan, basically.  Content to get away with a few elite souls, God simply watches passively as demons do whatever they want with pagans and most Christians alike, encouraging the evil and deceiving the good, with only a token resistance from Heaven.

I don’t really think that is what he meant to say. And perhaps the book ends on a more uplifting note. But for me, right now, I can’t go on reading it in good conscience, because I feel it makes it harder for me to love God and my fellow humans.   I don’t want to think of God as some petulant demiurge who sees his creation go haywire and reacts with anger and then resignation as it goes to Hell. Or like a constructor who has built a magnificent house which then catches fire and he stands outside, watching as the house burns down with most of his children still inside. There is something horrifying and twisted about this vision of a world abandoned to insane spirits of the netherworld.  I cannot believe this was how the book was intended, but that was what I took away from it. And I cannot guarantee that other readers will fare better, though I sincerely hope so.

I should probably watch some Happy Science to get back my belief in God and the future.

RPGs and spirituality

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We live in a world bound by rules. And even though we try to push the limits, they are there. But while we are here, we are simultaneously in another, greater world, in which this world is just like a shared dream: Small, limited, not quite real. And the rules that apply to our world are different from those that apply to the greater world, the Real World to which we all return when we log off.

It was around 1964 that I got the basic inspiration for what we today call “role-playing games”, or RPGs. In its basic form, it consisted of a hero, a sword, potions, trolls to be defeated, and leveling up. The levels were counted by the number of heads on the trolls. Admittedly a rather rudimentary design, but then again I was about six years old. The world’s first official RPG was released in Sweden approximately ten years later unbeknown to me. At that time I was already a teenager, but I did not play RPGs. I only learned about these later, and was surprised.

The people who were young when the first wave or RPGs spread around the western world? They are now ruling that world. They are the politicians, the businessmen, the preachers, and the women who bring all of these low when the time comes. Today we live in the first society where RPGs are widespread, a natural part of culture.

Regular playing of RPGs are likely to accustom people to the thought that there are different levels of reality at which a world can exist. Clearly the worlds of City of Heroes or The Sims are much less real than our world, and yet they are quite fleshed out with so many different possibilities that all humans now alive, if they spent as much of their lives as biologically possible just playing these games, would not in a lifetime exhaust all possible combinations, even if there was no new content added (which there is several times a year).

As these virtual worlds become ever more lifelike, there is bound to sneak in a suspicion that our world may not be the most real one. Thus, The Matrix. But Buddhists have claimed for 2500 years or so that this world is illusionary, except perhaps for the mind itself. Other religions also chime in that the Real World is “up there”, not here on Earth.

Clearly spirituality came first, by thousands of years, before roleplaying games. But do these games influence our openness to spiritual beliefs? Or is it the other way around, that people with an earlier, more concrete mindset would not have wanted to play RPGs even if they existed? Have children throughout history discovered the basics of RPGs, only to lay them aside when they grew into the more earthbound spirit of their times?

Online games – a road to Hell?

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Dogpile! From the online game City of Heroes.

I am not talking about online chess or Online Go, which are like their offline versions. I am sure better men than I have evaluated their ethical standing. If not, I would just say that if you are a sore loser or a triumphant winner, you should consider not playing even these unless you are a child. It is OK for children to experience a wide range of emotions so they can learn, since they hopefully have parents or guardians to contain them and help them back to balance. For adults, to be brought out of balance by a game is shameful and should give grounds for self-reflection.

What I want to write about, however, is the current popular breed of multiplayer roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, or City of Heroes/City of Villains. In these games, you take on the role of a character, almost always a fighter of some kind (there are also healers, but these go along with the fighters into battle and are targeted by enemies as well).

In some cases, the very name of the online game hints at the atmosphere: Nobody would want to spend their real life in a dark age, or a world at war, or a city of villains.

Fighting is the main appeal of these games. And not an abstract battle of anonymous pieces, like in chess. It is man against man, or at least team against team. While some games allow you to craft weapons or even grow crops, it is safe to say that the heart of these games is the fight to the (temporary) death.

The game would obviously not last very long if death was permanent, so a main difference from the real world is that you return to life with only a small penalty, which varies from game to game. It could be loss of experience points, gold or equipment, but in any case it is only a minor setback. As such, you are not actually killing the opponent’s character, only inconveniencing them. Still, it is generally referred to as killing, which it symbolizes.

In some games, your character can kill anyone and be killed by anyone. In others, the world is organized into two or three competing kingdoms, and you can only kill foreigners. This is more similar to war than murder, but it is still mostly undertaken in small groups of 6-8 players, although sometimes several groups band together for a raid.

In many games there are also servers or at least zones without “player killing”. Instead you have only “PvE”, “Player vs Environment”, in which you fight against computer-controlled opponents. These may look human or otherwise, but you cause no insult to actual real-world humans by defeating them. You may fight these imaginary enemies alone or in groups with other human players. In some games you can also have computer-controlled pets or servants that fight together with you.

By now we should have a pretty good idea of the ethics involved. Let us first measure our actions against the golden rule. Would you want others to do this unto you? In other words, can you put yourself in your opponent’s shoes? My observation is that people get very upset when defeated by a human opponent, and yet they persevere in doing it to others. So yeah, that is a definite danger zone.

You may argue that you would never kill anyone in real life, but you ARE causing emotional upheaval to real people over the Internet. And you are doing so by going through the motions of killing a humanoid character, which has a quite different flavor from beating someone in a game of checkers or a sports competition. I can see this from the intense reaction of the victims: Curses and profanity abound in PvP zones, and threats that are not always restricted to the game. Clearly the opponent really feels hated.

In short, you are adding to the total of suffering in the world, and as such I am bound to advice against it. This is not what we were born for. Or born again for, as the case may be.

There is another element to it, and that is what you do to your own soul. Let us consider the fate of the soul upon death. It is common in western religion to see the further reward or punishment of the soul as imposed by a foreign will. Basically this guy, God, sits on a throne and decrees your fate. As such, he can be reasoned with, at least by paid experts, so that you can go to Heaven even if you don’t fit in there at all. Indeed, you may not even enjoy Heaven unless you get a brain transplant first, which kind of defeats the point of going there in the first place. If someone else arrives there with your name, it is not much to pop the champagne for.

Buddhism and some parts of Christianity have a somewhat different view. The afterlife is not decided by God’s personal opinion, but on the objective measure of what your soul is like at the time of your passing.

In a manner of speaking, the afterlife is indeed like a virtual reality, in that you are unberthed from your body and all things familiar and thrown into a world of the soul. (Unless, as Jehovah’s Witnesses believe, you simply wake up later in a newly resurrected body. Would be nice, but you still don’t get back to the life you lived. It will anyway be a new and different world.) Now, if you have trained yourself to see life as an ongoing fight for your very existence, to see any stranger as a potential enemy, and you golden rule has become “do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first”… Now, if God does not put you on a fast train but simply let you gravitate toward the afterlife where your soul naturally belongs… Not a good scenario, is it?

Approximately ten years ago, I used to play the computer roleplaying game Daggerfall daily. It was not an online game, so we always knew that the innumerable opponents were computer-generated. Even so, on an online group dedicated to the game, one of the players mused that perhaps we would go to Daggerfall when we died. He did not seem to think this was a bad thing, and it is indeed a world of amazing possibilities, filled with magic and wonders. Even so, I can think of better fates, due exactly to the constant threat of violence and murder.

At the time, I did not think it possible that we could actually go to Daggerfall after our death, of course. Now I am less sure. In Christianity, as it is commonly understood, there is only Heaven and Hell. But Jesus says that “in my Father’s house there are many rooms” [or even “mansion” in some translations], and also that there are different degrees of punishment for those worthy of that. Given the psychic energy that thousands of people pour into computer games, it is not entirely beyond the pale that a psychic realm – a world of the soul – may be created to accommodate those souls who feel more at home there than in the ordinary world.

In the Judeo-Christian creation myth, God placed the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, even though it could at the time only bring ruin to mankind. This was not an act of cruelty, but a symbol that to God, freedom is more important than life. If they were willing to trade eternal life for knowledge of evil, then so be it. If God still has the same mindset of valuing the freedom of the soul, it is not entirely unthinkable that those who freely choose an imaginary realm of strife will also go to an imaginary realm of strife after their tenure in the flesh has ended.

In any case, there will not be Player vs Player in Heaven, I am quite confident of that. In Valhalla, though…

Wakeup call

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My heart went racing out of control again this evening a bit before 20 (8PM). It went at top speed for about 5 minutes.  Even after it returned to near normal levels, the event has left me half dazed, as if my senses are partly muted or fogged, and I am weak.

As suspected, I felt rather less assured about my eternity when actually facing it. Then again, part of that was from the fact that this all happened after I had brazenly ignored God’s plea to stop.  (Again, for the usual values of God: I can’t claim to be a prophet who sits in the council of the Most High, only that something more concrete than a conscience is transmitting thoughts to me that seem to be of a Heavenly nature. I, however, am not of a Heavenly nature, and the contrast bothers me.)

I guess it is not a certain thing that I will have months or at least weeks to prepare for my final departure. I should bear that in mind.

As for the health side of this, my state-assigned doctor knew of a couple such racing heart episodes from 2005, I think it was, possibly one in 2006. He was not particularly worried that I would die on the spot, but rather told me to contact the clinic so they could do an EKG (ECG) while the event was unfolding.  The tests done at other times were glowingly positive in all respects.

I would probably not have been very worried either if it was his heart. -_- But it feels kind of threatening when it is about me, the most important person in my world.

Dreaming of “Happy Science”

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I guess it had to happen sooner or later. This morning, just before I woke up, I had a lifelike dream where Happy Science in Norway held a congress on the south coast, so it was convenient for me to attend. It turned up that there were actually very few members who attended (though there may have been others who for various reasons could not). The national leader, a woman, was there though, and at least one other guy who was a member.

I apologize for the fact that if you google Happy Science Norway, my blog will come at the top of the list. I did not ask Google to do that! I guess I am just that popular. -_- There actually is a small division of Happy Science in Norway, or at least there was last summer. Unfortunately it seems to have gone underground again, if it still exists, I have not seen any mention of them since last fall. As I am not actually a member of the organization, I feel that it is not appropriate for me to give out any kind of contact information on the Web. For all I know, the Norwegian leader in real life may have left the organization or the nation or even the mortal world. Oh well, if Mr Okawa’s plans come to fruition, they will definitely be back, very much so, until the whole country is brightly lit with Buddha’s golden Light. But for now at least, my dreams are not the reality.

Back in my dream, the female boss turned out to be polite but very hard-nosed / businesslike. She spent a lot of time with me, reviewing the changes that the Truth had made in my life. There was quite a number of them, something that made her happy. She also inquired about my plans for the future, among other things how long I thought it would be before I was a millionaire. Even in the dream, that was a “what the heck” moment.

In real life, Happy Science in Japan has a reputation for being an upper class cult, with a disproportionate number of successful businessmen and even high-ranking politicians as members or closely aligned with it. Due to its financial freedom, the organization even participated in the country’s general election in competition with the two main parties, although in the end almost no one voted for them. They still have indirect influence though because the doctrine mostly appeal to the rich and the intellectual, whereas most other religions condemn prosperity to some degree and discourage people from thinking too deeply. Mr Okawa however feels that good people ought to be the richest and smartest, that way goodness will get the upper hand in society, so he encourages innovation and lifelong learning and seeking positions of power and responsibility.

Back in the dream, someone appeared with some papers regarding the congress, and the boss gave them to me to read through and sign, presumably because I was local to the area. Reluctantly I decided to sign them. Where was the other guy who I had assumed was the second-in-command? How had I ended up becoming Happy Science’s face toward the Norwegian public? 

And then I woke up, made a Google search and ended up asking myself the exact same thing.

Good Endings

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Not all love stories have happy endings, and not all frogs are princes. Well, perhaps deep inside, but it would require divine intervention in some cases!

It has gradually become clearer to me that my JulNoWriMo novel is in fact like a single play-through of a ren-ai game (dating sim or visual novel of romantic nature).

When playing such a game, you get to know a number of imaginary people of the preferred gender, and based on your choices, their relationship with you will rise or fall. At some point you will need to show preference for one of them over the other – and it needs to be realistic in terms of your personal statistics –  in order to get a “good ending”.  Depending on the maturity of the game, the depiction of a good outcome may vary, but that is somewhat beyond today’s lesson.

What I want to achieve is to write a novel that may or may not lead to a “good ending”, but that at least conveys the personalities of the girls so well that the reader in his or her imagination is able to go down the other paths to reach a “good ending” for their favorite girl without compromising her personality. It is a safe bet that I won’t get anywhere near a completion in July. Probably not ever, if I know myself, which I increasingly do.  But there is always a small chance.

One of the most unlikely inspirations for my writing is the book The Laws of Courage by Ryuho Okawa, the would be world savior from Japan. (Or Atlantis, or Venus, depending on your time horizon.) Despite the occasional (well meant?) blasphemy, he is a really interesting person. And he truly writes like a god – more exactly Hermes, the god of speed. A couple years older than me, he has already written over 500 books!  Only about 15 of these are available in English from Amazon.com though. This is the latest of them, though a new one is supposed to be released later this year.

The Laws of Courage is written mostly for the young reader, although there is also a chapter about how to keep the good part of being young – a “hungry” spirit – later in life. Even simpler than some of his other books, it speaks directly to the concerns of young people in the midst of making choices for their lives. As such, it gives me some good idea for my own writing.

His ultimate advice for living life like a roaring fire of courage, is to imagine your death.  What do you want to have achieved when you die? How do you want to be remembered? What kind of person do you want to be when you lay down the workbook of your life? In its naked essence, courage means to be ready to die.

(Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of courage.  Although a couple weeks ago I was lying on my bed, thinking about how the floor of this old house might collapse under the weight of my double bed, and suddenly I realized that unexpectedly I was not afraid of death. I am sure this is not permanent. When I get severely ill, I will probably feel fear again. To some degree I think this is biological. What I no longer felt was the deep conviction that upon leaving this world, I would surely go to Hell.  Maybe I will and have only been deluded by the writings of the Antichrist.  But then again, something has begun to change deep inside me.  I am more consciously thinking of how I can actually be a blessing, rather than how I can rig things so I won’t be punished.)

Perhaps the nature of love, even divine love, is  to go down the path to the Good Ending for the other person. Which, with pleasant irony, is the one that does not end.

Mormons, morons and me

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I’m sorry… I lied. Or at least cowardly failed to tell the truth, which would be something like “I know what you are, and I assure you in front of the Light that we would both spend our time more wisely talking to cauliflowers than each other.”

I need to take God more seriously when he “talks” to me. That is to say, when I know in my heart what God wants me to do. OK, it is sometimes hard to say what is God and what is just plain sanity. Like “don’t be polite to Mormons unless lives depend on it”.

The other day I met two of those excessively well-dressed cute boys, speaking reasonably good Norwegian, hailing me on my way to the bus. They wanted to talk to me about Jesus Christ. I think the irony here can be cut with a diamond saw, but being the polite guy I am, I stopped and talked with them. Not wanting to get into a religious discussion, I praised Jesus Christ for his contribution to western civilization, which it is safe to say would not have been anywhere the same – or even been anywhere – without him. No offense to Hermes and friends, but history just made a pretty sharp turn down there in the Middle East back then.

Needless to say, the overly polite missionaries gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon (which is supposedly completed my Mr. Mormon’s son, Moroni, but which was for some reason not named accordingly.) Since I seem to have displaced my previous copy – probably during one of the moves – I eventually accepted the book, and in return gave them my phone number. The local branch of God did not approve.

The book is, for lack of a better word, even more “moronic” than I remember it from the first time I acquainted myself with it. That is not to say that it is a bad document. It has much positive, which I believe is without exception lifted from the Bible, of which it is a rather obvious copy. My impression is that the “Mormons” – the members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints – are good people, by and large. They also count the Bible as Holy Scripture. Not saying that this makes them good people – there are some truly awful people who worship the Bible as if it were a god.

The thing is, even if I had the power to dissuade these missionaries from their path – which I can’t, since I am not that awesome, and since changing their religion would cause them to lose face, not to mention their friends, their jobs, their families and their future marriages – even if I could change their minds, it seems unlikely that I could change them for the better. That is not to say that there is no better faith than theirs. Mine is better for me, obviously, but it is also pretty personal and verging on unique. What I mean is, most organized religions would not really be an improvement in terms of living a happy, peaceful, friendly life which most likely would serve as good practice for a great afterlife.

Even in this day and age, most people are not very personal. That is to say, they don’t have a soul (psyche) that is very differentiated. Much like sheep (which incidentally have a very good reputation in the Bible) these people tend to look to those around them and run in the same direction. For such people to understand me and others like me is quite literally impossible. This is not a matter of me being “better” than them, but rather more capacious. A child of 7 may be morally superior to a 70 year old, but there are many things the child cannot possibly understand. In the same way, there are things an unreflected person cannot understand, even after a long life, because that long life does not include that particular type of experiences that a reflected, individualized person has.

Needless to say, people who only have experience of the 5th dimension (Blue vMeme) and below will firmly believe that this is very nearly all there is. They may dimly perceive that there is something more which may be attainable in this life, but that is the realm of prophets and such.

As I said, this is really the situation for all religions. I am sure the vast majority of Happy Science followers have the same sheepish attitude. Even among “Smith’s Friends” (not Joseph Smith, Johan Oscar Smith) there accumulated such people over the years, despite starting out with none of them and literally telling those who appeared to get out. I guess it can’t be helped. But I should have listened to God – or the voice of reason, since they agree heartily on this – and kept far away from this latest bunch.

Pseudo-Messiah dream

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Do I have a Messiah complex? In my dreams!  My subconscious reads my journal (no surprise there) and mocks my resolution to not claim spiritual VIP status.

In my dream this morning, I am like Jesus. I do wonders, I preach goodness, I am seized by the authorities and sentenced to death. Except I don’t die, unbeknownst to them, I escape at the last moment. Actually this is the third year in a row they do this, so they are understandably upset at this point. In my dream I remember the two previous attempts. This time they lock me in a small hut and burn it down. Somehow I quantum tunnel out of there or something. At the end of the dream I can no longer perform miracles. But then again, it is a year till next Easter (or the equivalent in this culture).

The dream was dramatic enough while it lasted, but when I woke up I saw the absurdity of it and that’s when I thought of Life of Brian, which I only know from pop culture references. Perhaps I should watch it some day if it is still around.

For now, though, I just stick with my plan to not claim spiritual superhero status. Or at least not above 6th-dimensional programmer. ^_^